Django Book Beta


I know of a few people who code in Django, and there is a book coming out soon that is in “Beta” online, and I have to say it is the most intuitive collaborative book editing system I have seen. Great idea, excellent execution.

Anybody can add a comment to the sidebar, and they are indicated by a little icon (seen in my screenshot). I think that someone could recycle this idea for blogs. Imagine if instead of having comments be at the end of the post, they could be inline? I think that would rock.

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6 responses to “Django Book Beta”

  1. Actually, this system is from some dude’s website that was featured on digg in the last week or two. If memory serves, it was originally for WordPress.

  2. I think that the major drawback to this approach would be that it becomes harder to follow a conversation, since they are spread into several different buckets. So this approach probably works the best with longer posts. But I could be wrong.

  3. Yeah, Jack Slocum’s blog was the inspiration for the book’s comment system, and I used quite a bit of code from his YUI-ext library to pull it off.

    Chris: actually, in a way suppressing conversation is kinda the point; we’re trying to promote specific, targeted discussion about how to improve the book. So far, the limiting nature of the system works in our favor.

    I’m still not sure it’s suited for general-purpose use, but as a system of collaborative editing — which is what we’re trying to do — it works amazingly well.

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